Like lipoprotein nanoparticles, the MIT team's new lipopeptide particles are spheres
whose outer membranes are composed of long chains with a fatty lipid tail that faces into the particle.
Toward the end of her postdoc, Chacinska identified a protein called Mia40,
whose role was to transport precursor proteins to the space lying between the
outer and inner
membranes of mitochondria.